And the rule committee has now reinstated the bungee cord for HS warm up! Maybe that should be in the rules "can be use only if the standards are secured in such a way that they cannot be pulled over" OK just my .02

If you have no way to bolt them to the ground then you can bolt them to some 2"x6" boards about 5' long and run the boards under the matts. The wieght of the mat sits on board and they won't fall over.

I am generally surprised, people post like its their job about pole vault safety. And so far nothing real in terms of safety response...

When ever I get off the plane or bus and show up to the competition site, first thing I do on the pole vault runway is take a walk around. Moving/removing hard items that would cause injury, (Bags, hurdles, equipment boxes), checking the box for lips or awkward angles, and making sure the standards are stable.

With national endeavors to make pole vault helmets mandatory at the high school level, and companies influencing the development of soft boxes, and especially how kevin has influenced the sport, I am sort of baffled by the response that this video evoked...

Never ever, I mean ever wrap the bungee or otherwise secure it to the standards!

Prior to my arriving to coach at the high school I presently coach at... the vaulters made a habit of wrapping the bungee once around the standards so it would "stay on"... well one day they had the thing secured to the standard extensions piece... but in their haste seemed to not notice how securely the extension was attached. What followed was a blow-through vault leading to a fully loaded bungee cord, think ballista here, which was followed by the release of the standard extension. The extender landed directly in the kids head.

Cracked skull, internal cranial bleeding... coma.

The kid was fine a year later, but barring the arrival of a full time vault coach, the pole vault "program" was to be dropped from the school as it has been from so many high schools. Both the kid and the school we're lucky to escape the incident.

I can laugh and remember fondly the days of 12 by 12 pads with no front buns, and the metal fence that ran right up to the edge of those pads that more than one vaulter crashed upon... but we did see too many needless, and careless injuries... and if vaulting is to survive for the next generation we had best make it as safe as we can by avoiding the stupid and avoidable practices that increase the risks associated with the pole vault. Sloppy practices never helped anyone jump higher.

A simple solution is to throw some weights on the base. This happened to us all the time so we just started putting on sandbags and 25lb weights that football players left out. We never had a problem again.